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Liminal Contexts and Critical Insights: The Cases of McLuhan and Debray

  • Peter McMylor
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Abstract

Martins raised very early the issue of the impact of the new communications and media technologies on critical thought. To analyse these themes further, it is fruitful to compare two figures—Marshall McLuhan and Régis Debray—whose work reveals particular responsiveness to this transformed environment. McLuhan is famously an explorer of the new media of the 1960s, whilst Debray, after his imprisonment for revolutionary activity in Latin America, also turned himself into a media analyst. In many respects what is most interesting is not only how different these two figures were in their background, culture and politics but also how sensitive they both were to the changing media environment and the need to derive new styles of research to deal with this situation.

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© The Author(s) 2018

Authors and Affiliations

  • Peter McMylor
    • 1
  1. 1.The University of ManchesterManchesterUK

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